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Behind The Development Of The iPod nano
bonch writes "A Time Magazine article on the behind-the-scenes development of the iPod nano reveals that development work began just nine months ago, when the iPod mini was still a top-seller. Every internal component was redesigned and packed into every millimeter of the space inside. Famed Apple designer Jonathan Ives spent months on the tiniest of details, like the laser-etching of the logo and the roughness of the clickwheel compared to the smoothness of the rest of the exterior. 'I know you're not going to consciously find these details particularly appealing," says Ives, 'but I think it's the fact that we've worried about all of them that makes the product so precious.'"
At any rate, my bet is that Apple didn't run their prototypes over with cars. Or did they??
"It's still not slim enough, give me the BFH.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What is the next BIG thing?
"'I know you're not going to consciously find these details particularly appealing," says Ives, 'but I think it's the fact that we've worried about all of them that makes the product so precious.'"
Then why do they matter? As long as my product works, and works well, and I notice the quality, shouldn't that be enough? Why should the product cost more money simply because someone labored over it to add features I will never notice? I don't buy a product because the developer decided to make it "precious" by worring about it too much. Just a thought.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
I know you're not going to consciously find these details particularly appealing," says Ives, 'but I think it's the fact that we've worried about all of them that makes the product so precious.'
"At which point in the interview, Ives, began sandpapering his own fingerprints from his fingers in order to leave no smudges on The Precious."
The name is Jonathan Ive, without an "s". Sheesh. It's even spelled correctly in the article. ::sigh::
they certainly had some crappy ideas on design. :-)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
In addition to Libraries of Congress and football fields, today we add two need units of measurement: "pencil width" and "bucks in quarters". Alas, Google has yet to enter the new units into the search engine as this search produced no useful results. But just you wait! Apple has always been a trendsetter. Soon all the models will be listing their measurements in terms of pencils and weight in terms of bucks in quarters!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
it's Jonathan Ive, not Ives.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
It's being reported that Canadian customs is stopping shipments because they believe that Robert Redford may be trying to hide inside a Nano.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The great thing about the Nano (from an Apple perspective anyway) is that it hits the price vs. features sweet spot that fills the last gap - anyone who didn't have an iPod before, because the big'uns are too expensive or the Shuffle is too... well, the non-geek is pretty incredulous when told "no, it doesn't have a screen". The Mini's, while selling well, really did overlap the iPod's market, because they were practically the same size - essentially trading price for capacity. That leaves the two on pretty equal standing, whereas the Nano changes the dynamic altogether. The price AND size/weight vs capacity will draw in that previously alienated market who want a fully functional player but not their entire library in their pocket. Bravo Apple!
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The reported battery life is 14 hours.
The user interface is one of the top reasons people buy iPods - almost every review of every MP3 player compares the interface to the iPod and almost every other brand falls short - the iPod truly is the standard against which all else is compared.
In industrial design, as with programming, the best solution is difficult/expensive to attain but is elegant and almost mind-bogglingly simple. A perfect example: the iPod click-wheel and the way it works with the iPod OS.
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That interview just underlines apple's focus isn't on The Next Big Thing, or technological progress, it's something much more attractive to consumers - elegant design.
They've been very lucky, releasing highly polished articles at just the time when consumers, spoiled by choice, are beginning to use quality of a design as a differentiator betweem almost equal rival products.
Sometimes they're monomaniacal obsession with elegance causes them to make decisions that seem idiotic from our technical viewpoint (you can't get to the battery on an iPod because they wanted it to look "perfect" with no nasty access doors...) but the public doesn't care.
Design is the new black.
The Mini was a top seller right up until Apple replaced it with the nano.
I'm pretty impressed with that move, myself. Discontinuing a very successful product just because you have a better one takes more guts than most companies have.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Attention to detail has been Apple's hallmark on hardware for quite some time now. Anyone who owns a Powerbook, for example will have noticed the ports on the right hand side are arranged in size order, and there are USB ports on both sides. They're just little touches, but they mean a lot in everyday usage. Apple brought the iPod to the mp3 player market, and its design & interface have managed to win out over technically superior players time and time again. The nano is neccessary for Apple to stay one step ahead on having this cool factor that other vendors strive for.
Business Voyeur
Yep. You are paying extra 'cause it's white and it's an iPod. And also for that genuine "new apple smell". Them mind-bending chemicals they stuff in there to make your purchase seem totally justified and explainable don't come cheap :)
That said, it doesn't play windows media audio files. So it's doing a damned fine thing by trying to get people NOT to use that shitty format. It's also the only player on the market that legally allows you to play files from the worlds most popular online music store. It also has one of the best audio-quality ratings of any handheld device (beating even some large hi-fi's). It's also not made by creative, who despite making the worlds best soundcards make the worlds worst quality players.
But yeah, who needs extreme over-engineered precision quality audio-heaven. After all, these are people that will accept and PAY good money to rent 128k WMA files. They deserve shit.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Already there are several comments about how "Brand X" player is cheaper, or "Brand Y" player has more features, or "Brand Z" has more capacity. What nobody will accept is that no other player has the same _combination_. Anyone can make a big player cheaply. Or a small player with 128MB of flash. Only this has the capacity, size, and usability combination. If you don't value that, that's fine, but many people are willing to pay for quality.
I drive a Corolla, my Grandma has a Jaguar S-Type (I think thats the model). They are roughly the same size, they serve exactly the same purpose. Now granted the Jag has better performance, but you are paying a lot for image. Then again people complain about fancy cars, so you can't please everyone no matter what.
This makes you wonder what the world would be like if Microsoft played fairly.
I think it might be for the better, but Apple seems to have a little bit of a monopolistic practice in their sleeves also (not letting any other mp3 devices play with iTunes, and iPods only working on iTunes).
I really don't get why everyone is saying the nano is too pricey. A 4GB flashdrive goes for $250-300 on Froogle (I'm sure there's some geekier place to check, but whatever). So basically with the nano you pay for the flash memory, and get the music part free. I also see a lot of complaining that the nano is worse than the mini because it doesn't have the same GB/$ ratio. I know it's unnerdy and wrong, but I would rather have the nano, which I can wear on a lanyard, and the durability of the flash over the hard drive. I'm seriously thinking of selling my 3G 20GB and picking one of these up.
1. It is both efficient and sturdy. In addition to reading online reviews, I've been using my own for just over 24 hours now and it is fantastic. Did you not read the last Slashdot post on its durability testing? I'd call withstanding being hurled out the window of a moving car at 50mph, then run over twice and still playing fine pretty sturdy. Yes, it looks and feels very fragile at first, but slipped into one of those rubber sheaths and it's almost indestructable.
It costs 199 or 249 - for a flash-based player with that much capacity, it is a very reasonable price. And remember, you aren't just paying for the technology, but the unparalleled industrial design genius that has been poured into the iPod. Its interface is, after all, the standard against which all others are judged.
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Does your 256MB flash card hold 4 GB of data?
If not, it's hardly a replacement, is it?
The puck mouse was designed to address a real issue/problem. With a normal mouse, you need to rest your wrist on the table, and then to move the mouse, you have to move your whole wrist sideways/forwards/round in circles...you get the picture. It's slow, cumbersome, and causes all sorts of prolonged use problems.
Now enter the puck mouse. You still rest your wrist on the table, but you can move the whole mouse with ONLY your fingers! Very fast, light, easy, and sensible.
Now, I'm not going to deny it sucks the first time to use a puck mouse. In fact I'm one of the people who threw them away when they started coming with the Macs for the labs at university. But one week I was forced to use one - and guess what, your body starts to remember/know which way around the mouse is after about...ohhh...an hour of use.
When you think about it, this is no where near the learning curve of a Dvorak keyboard, which is everyone's darling at the moment. So - enough of the lame puck mouse bashing. Go get one on ebay for like 10c. Your wrist will love you, and you too will have the chance to marvel at possible the most underrated and misunderstood computer inventions of the past decade.
Ok - off my chest now...peace :)
...Because it implies an all-new generation of technology, when the truth is that most of its internals are silicon that Apple just hasn't used for its iPods but has been used extensively elsewhere, as Ars Technica noted in their review posted here yesterday. This isn't a bad thing, of course, it's just kind of lazy journalism, IMO.
From the review: "Most of the other components are run of the mill as far as iPods go. The heart of the iPod, the PortalPlayer chip, was upgraded to a slightly newer model (the PP5021C-TDF), the audio codec is the same Wolfson Microprocessor (WM8975G) found in the current generation iPods, a new power management unit by Phillips (CF50607), a batch of 32MB of Samsung SDRAM (534-K9WAG08U1M) replaces the old Hynix chips, and the LCD is of unknown manufacturer but it's a 16-bit color, 176x132 1.5" model."
He's already calling the Nano his precious. Obviously the dual personality displayed by Gollum/Smeagol is beginning as well. "Tricksy little Ballmerses stoles our interfaces!!"
Have you seen the size of these things? I have handled one at the local compUSA store and (to put it politely) you are out of your mind to think that its the same size as a 256MB flash card, MP3 player, FM radio, and voice recorder. These things make the iPod mini look big and clumsy. and it makes my mp3 player (with its radio and 1.25GB) look like a dinosaur
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I've heard complaints that the nano is a step backwards in capacity. However, a recent survey showed that the average MP3 player has about 300 songs on it, while the average iPod has 500. So for most people 4 gigs is enough.
Maybe that survey was reported here. I don't remember, one of the side effects of reading too many web sites in a day.
After being an iPod user for several years, I took everything that the iPod offered for granted. After purchasing something different (iAudio U2 1GB) for my exercizing needs, the drawbacks became clear.. let me list what I found so far.
Accessories. This is a key point for me. iPods, being the most popular MP3 device, has a TON of addons, accessories, and etc for it. It gives you a ton of options later on, should you decide to add something. Meanwhile, I STILL haven't been able to find a damn belt clip for the iAudio U2. You know, something to hold it on my waist. Yes, it's that bad if it's not an iPod.
User Interface. Most people take it for granted, but UI of iPods are superior to anything I've used. It's simple, clear, and easy to use, which by far appeals to the mass than something complicated. My iAudio U2 isn't that bad, but I miss my iPod interface. Easy and simple, with no complicated controls. I looked through my friend's iRiver 799 manual the other day, and it was horrible. You had to memorize combos to access certain features. Ugh. And the clickwheel is a godsend. Simple things like a joystick on the iAudio U2 doesn't compare at all.
iTunes. Very important. With this, you can easily buy songs off the music store and sync them to your iPod. And sync is amazing. Plug in your iPod, let it automatically sync, and you're good to go. My iAudio U2 requires you to drag and drop. That's pretty easy too, but I like the iTunes method better. And don't forget other iTunes features, such as Podcasts.
Form factor. Face it. People do care about how a device looks and feels. It doesn't matter if a device has all the features in the world, if it's ugly as sin and big as a brick. Things such as a voice recorder and line in port are useless and only make the device bigger and bulkier. How many people would actually make use of those features? I haven't used it once on my iAudio. Granted, I like the FM radio, but that depends on people's taste. I'm not complaining about the size of the iAudio U2, but iPods are generally smaller than anything else on the market today (And do look better).
Well, that's all I can think of by now. But if you think that people are buying iPods because of the brand name, you're dead wrong.
(Oh yeah, the Nano comes in black too)
... it also gets the market who wants a flash-based player so it doesn't skip when running: the nano is my first ipod and I basically ordered it 5 minutes after reading the 'how can we destroy it' article here on /.
I do plan to eventually get a 60gig one at some point, but right now the nano just hits the sweet spot for me in terms of durability, price, size and capacity.
-- the cake is a lie
I'm in the same boat as you. After the nano came out I'm considering one for the first time ever. So I borrowed my flatmate's to see how well it does with Linux/Gnome/Rhythmbox.
Flawlessly.
As soon as I plugged it in, an ipod shaped icon showed up on the desktop through which I could browse the thing. You can see everything on the ipod just through browing with Nautilus, or whatever your file browser is, but the songs are in some non-sensical folder structure. It's easier to use Rhythmbox. So I Open up Rhythmbox and click on the Ipod icon that had just showed up in the sources list and was able to browse the songs. Copied some songs from the Ipod to my computer by just dragging the song from Rhythmbox to my desktop, which I believe you can't do in itunes.
This was with Gnome 2.12, Rhythmbox 0.9, Ubuntu Breezy.
Here's a clue Mr "I design inside an aesthetic bubble", in the real world things people touch with their hands gets DIRTY. If you make it from something that doesn't wipe clean, it stays dirty forever.
OK, this is going to be a bit of a rant. The basic problem is, I don't get why people love the click wheel. Yeah, it looks cool and minimalist, but people are always raving about the iPod's user interface, and the click wheel just doesn't seem to be all that good in that department.
Let me explain. I own an iPod Mini, and I like it. It looks cool, the battery life is quite good, and overall the user interface is well-designed. But, I primarily use this thing while I'm on the go (surprise). As such, I am usually doing something else while listening to music -- something that requires 95% of my attention. Namely, driving. I love that the iPod lets me have a bunch of songs in the car; previously I was keeping 10 or 15 CDs in the glove box, and I was always too lazy to change them out, so I wound up listening to the same music over and over and over.
Enter the iPod. Now everything is great. I got a $5 cable from Radio Shack and wired the thing into my car stereo's aux input. I keep the thing in a pocket that's very convenient to reach even while I'm driving; in fact, I barely have to move my hand.
So what's the problem? The problem is that the click wheel has no tactile feedback at all. It's just a big round thing, and pressing on it in different places does different things, but there is no way for your finger to tell where one place ends and the other begins. Would you want a keyboard that is perfectly flat and smooth across the top so that your fingers can't tell where one key stops and another starts? That's what the click wheel is like.
The reason this bugs me is that 99.9% of the time, I put the thing on shuffle, and I often want to skip a particular song when it comes up (if I'm not in the mood for it). So I reach for the iPod and press the track skip button, or at least I try. Because this requires me to push the right quarter of the wheel, I often get it wrong and punch the play/pause button or the menu button instead. Pushing play/pause results in silence. This is particularly irritating because many of the songs on the iPod start with a fade-in or a quiet part, and it's hard when I'm in the car and there's ambient noise to tell if the iPod has stopped playing because I've hit the wrong button or if the song is just quiet. So I pretty much have to grab the iPod and pull it up into my field of view or wait 30 seconds. Or crank up the volume nearly all the way to hear the difference and hope I don't damage my hearing. (Well, my car stereo isn't that powerful, but you get the idea.)
So, overall, I think the iPod does have a fairly good user interface, but I'd really much rather have the wheel and the buttons separate. The click wheel as it is makes the thing unnecessarily hard to use, and the only payoff you get in return is the "gee whiz" factor.
The Truth is, Apple could not have become a Monopoly, because Apple more-or-less created Microsoft. Microsoft won because they embraced open hardware, which was exactly why Apple lost. So it's not really realistic to ask "what if" when the scenerio was pretty impossible anyway. If Microsoft hadn't won, someone else would have, and Apple would be in the same position they are now.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
* Mini: "This thing is barely smaller than a regular iPod, costs almost the same, and still has a hard drive so I can't go jogging with it."
* Shuffle: "Great, so you shrunk it down and removed the harddrive, but no screen? How am I supposed to use this thing?"
* Nano: "Ah, perfect. Small enough to fit just about anywhere. Full screen and standard interface. And no harddrive!"
I wouldn't be surprised that Apple knew of the complaints they would get with the Mini and Shuffle even before their launches, but decided that those were the best that could be implemented at the manufacturing costs they were willing to have. It was all just stepping stones to get to the goal they had preset: Small, fully functional, flash. In short, Nano.
I can't tell if this is a troll or what...
Dude... if you can't manage not to scratch something for 4 weeks, I seriously question your ability to succeed in everyday tasks, like tying your shoelaces. Seriously. I use my 60gb iPod every day (and have for almost 10 months) and have nary a single scratch.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
My experience with the Nano hasn't been quite so good. I drove out to the local Apple Store several hours after they got their first shipment and came home with a 4G Nano in black. I opened it in the store, it powered up, but didn't have any songs pre-loaded, so I stuck it in my pocket and drove home.
When I got home, I was surprised to discover two things:
1. Just riding for an hour in my pocket with my cell phone scratched up the gorgeous clear plastic front.
2. The unit failed to power up reliably once I got home. I was able to hard-reset it a few times to gain limited functionality, and then it died completely.
I drove back to the store the following day, the techs there prounced it dead (after waiting for 45 minutes, grrr...) but they were out of the 4G black model. Not happy to settle for white or two gigs, I just got a refund.
I may, or may not, try again in the future. It sure is one sexy little toy, and it might still function after being run over by a car, but a screen that scratches so easily is completely unacceptable.
-p.
Actaully, yes it probably is worth it - as the commoditization of nearly every manufactured product makes the "race to the bottom" in regards to price harder and harder. I'm guessing Apple's philosophy is to make very high-quality and well-designed products (or at least the appearance of this), so people are willing to pay more.
(Which, personally, is a very good idea, imho. I know I'm personally getting tired of the now-broken crap I bought because of "wow - look how cheap this is".
My philosophy now-that-I'm-all-grown-up is: wait until I find something I really want, and then buy the best quality product I can.)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Several: Iiiiiiiiiiiiive.
Bedevere: Oooohooohooooo!
Launcelot: No no, aauuuugggh, at the back of the throat: aauuuugghhh.
Bedevere: No, no, no, oooooooooooh in surprise and alarm.
Launcelot: Oh, you mean a sort of AAAUUUGGHH?
Oooh! OH NO! It's the legendry black beast of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGH!!
It's called a nano Tube.
You can bet we would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market..
I don't get it. How could you possibly have a monopoly and the most expensive product on the market?
I can't even imagine a world where consumers want expensive computers so badly, no retailer would risk offending Apple by selling cheaper non-Apple PCs. It defies logic.
I find it misleading to claim Microsoft has "protected" us from an Apple monopoly, as Microsoft has never been a hardware company, and the entire idea of "commodity hardware" is derived solely from the availability of PC clones and not under Microsoft's control. IBM, not Microsoft, had a stranglehold on the PC market until Compaq reverse engineered the PC BIOS and produced a clone. Had IBM's lawsuit been successful, we probably would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market, Microsoft or no. It would have been an ugly battle until IBM was finally broken apart. Or until Apple grudgingly accepted low-cost Apple clones and took over the market. See how fun pure speculation can be?
As a counterpoint, you can imagine a world in which Microsoft did not have a virtual monopoly on office productivity applications and indeed on the entire chain down to the operating system, and had been forced to play nice with others. Perhaps the lock-in precluded some incredible innovation of the software side which our counterparts in the alternate universe simply could not imagine living without. Oh, I'm speculating again. It must be contagious.
That article mentions the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey... good comparison. If you scaled it, it's pretty close:
nano dimensions: 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27
monolith ratio: 9 x 4 x 1
scaled 0.4x: 3.6 x 1.6 x 0.4
So, it's a slightly (3%) taller and 2/3rds the thickness of a monolith.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The puck is so low profile that you don't have this problem - and with the sensitivity right up, you can move the pointer right across the screen with TINY movements of your fingers. You have to try it to apprecite the difference.
For the record, I don't use one and haven't for many years now. But I do think it's such a shame that many people - especially those here who are for the most part proponents of clever and considered design - dismiss it outright without considering why it is like it is.
Heh. Maybe I should have a new warcry - Viva Amiga, and the Puck!
So in a world of Apple, we have 80% Apple, 10% Creative, and 10% other.
To go with this, we'd also have:
Spare, clean OSes that don't try to do everything and be mediocre
(Compare to the MP3 players that have FM tuners, replaceable batteries, and voice recorders)
Good software on said OSes
(Compare to iTunes to all the other jukeboxes)
Price competition forcing the #2 manufacturer to actually LOSE money to compete
(Compare the fact that because Apple is cutting prices to maintain dominance, Creative is losing money to 'keep up')
So if Apple had captured the OS market, we'd be seeing:
Well designed OSes (like the iPods)
Fast adoption of new technology (The iPod was the first with the 1.8" hd when everyone else was using 3.5" and 2.5" drive, the first to use CF drives when everyone else was using flash, and now the first to use flash when everyone else has adopted CF. The iPod was also first to use a fast serial connection.)
Computers people LOVE to use (like the iPods)
Wait... all those things are true NOW in Apple computers.
So the only difference is, with 80% dominance, is that 80% of the populace would be:
Happy
Using a well designed OS
Using new technology
Instead of only 5% of the population.
GPL Deconstructed
I have not posted in eons. But parent comment takes the cake and I had to respond. Funny how trollish comments get rated as Insightful. The statement is a complete slander. The only complaint raised is "commodity hardware".
Do you have any other points on which you can compare Apple and Microsoft.
Do you think if Apple was a monopoly, Steve Jobs would have given up his reality distortion and would be a corporate suit? Forget the products, have you seen the passion with which the man introduces the products. If Apple was 80%, and Microsoft 20%, would anyone have come to watch Bill Gates introduce Windows Vista? The point being...despite market share Steve would have had passion for usability, and bill for unethical practices.
Do you think if Apple was a monopoly, the prices would be 10,000 per machine? Would not have Linux have much better opportunity in such times? After all, Linux is trying to fight a $300 operating system and could be winning with some more effort. With a $5000 operating system, and another $5000 for hardware, Linux would make sure Apple could not remain a monopoly.
Do you think if Apple was a monopoly, it would not innovate? With limited R&D funds, Apple is able to develop such cool technology. Give them twice the money, give them their lost 10 years and they would have had an operating system of circa 2010 NOW. Why? Because for all the market leadership Microsoft has, they do not have imagination. They know how to copy, not how to be creative.
I can go on, but I wonder. Why is the parent comment insightful?
You really never have held a managerial position, or considered this at all.
Just because this is superior is no reason to replace a hugely successful product. Most, heck pretty much all, companies would say "Sure, go ahead, WORK on the next gen one, and we'll look to think about releasing it when the current hot model starts to loose some sales fizz".
Most companies would never do this. Why would you? Why would you invest all the money to tool up and build these things on mass while you've got a product you spent heaps of money on out there recouping its development costs and reaping a tidy profit? Why would you? You wait until you can see you can make more money with the new product.
Now... this is where Apple is being different... they are looking at the iPod Nano and thinking "You know what, this is going to be even bigger than the iPod and the Mini, probably combined. It's just too sweet a thing to wait on... let's go for it, let's release it now"
I'm no Mac fanboy by any stretch, don't own any Apple hardware at all, but I can see this as a pretty bold move... and one that will pay handsomly.
Bring out this before the competition has really had a chance to combat the mini... that's pretty darn smart.
DRM, lack of WMA compatiblity, ITMS files can't play on other players, "this here no name plastic player from China is cheaper and plays Ogg and... yadda yadda yadda".
OK, sit down, shut up and pay attention.
The overwhelming majority of people who buy iPods and KEEP buying iPods don't care a fat rat's ass about ANY OF THAT. Not one little bit do they care.
They want something that simply works. They don't care about ITMS DRM. They DO care about the fact that they can get music they want right now for a modest sum. They know they'll get a quality file.
They buy iPods because the interface is simple and it works well.
They buy iPods because they are small, sturdy and hold an amzing amount of music.
The overwhelming majority of the buying public is who Apple is targetting the iPod line to.
Not you smelly Linux hippies with your handmade machines and having to config it. And then you have to write some shell scripts. Update your RPMs. You have to partition your drives. And patch your kernel. Compile your binaries. Check your version dependencies. Probably do that once or twice.
Just to install an MP3 player.(and after all that, you STILL don't have more friends!)
You are not the consumer Apple cares about.
You have never been the consumer Apple cares abou.
You will never be the consumer Apple cares about.
Get over yourself and welcome your new, Jonathan Ive designed overlords!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
The Ipod family is a proof that design matters. Now if I only could convince my boss that we should write our software the same way. It isn't like industrial designers are paid less than software developers, right?
"get one on ebay for like 10c. Your wrist will love you, ..."
:-/
My wrist already loves me...
Call tech support or visit the store. A lemon is a lemon, whether made by dell or apple...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
"Every internal component was redesigned and packed into every millimeter of the space inside."
Wow, this thing is so small that it's only one-dimensional!
To perform a hard reset on an iPod, I believe you need to hold down the center button and the play/pause button for 5 (maybe 10?) seconds.
Most of Apple's components are exactly the same as PCs, except sell for more.
Respectfully disagree. I've got Macs that I've owned for five, ten years, maybe longer, and they work as well as they ever have. In contrast, it's pretty well-known that when you buy a $300-400 Windows-compatible PC from eMachines or Compaq, you're getting the cheapest possible components with the shortest possible warranty and the highest likelyhood of manufacturing defects.
When you buy a cheap PC, you often get a cheap PC. When you buy a Mac, you're paying for quality control and professional design. (Yeah, in fact, it does cost more to shape a piece of plastic differently if you're the only one doing it and you had to research the best possible way to shape it.)
As long as money exists, there are people who will prefer a cheaper computer to a more expensive one, even if it's less effective. This is why the iPod has "only" 75% marketshare instead of 95%, and why Apple computers could never have gotten the 90%+ marketshare Windows enjoys today.
So essentially you're willing to do the work yourself. Your player only has basic functionality, but you can extend that functionality through manpower.
The iPod can do a large number of useful things on its own. For example, iTunes can automatically fill unused space with random songs of high ranking. The iPod can automatically play songs with higher ranking more frequently. While you're listening to a song, you can change its rating. Once its hooked up to the computer again, that rating will automatically be uploaded back to iTunes such that your library will slowly get a better idea of what you like to listen to. iTunes automatically downloads songs into appropriate folders, and the iPod automatically organizes music by id3 tags such that you don't need to worry about putting things into separate folders.
I'm certain you can duplicate all of that functionality manually. I'm also certain that you can change all of your OS settings through a text editor. Now you might be willing to sacrifice functionality for cost, but I'd dare say that the majority of people prefer it the other way.
Also, the iPod's physical interace runs circles around the NEX IIe's button. You need to put in effort to make NEX IIe's button work efficiently. On the iPod, even if you stuck all of the songs in a single list, you'd be able to get to it relatively quickly.
I don't understand why you get so mad, it just boils down to personal preference anyway. You are willing to sacrifice cost for functionality, almost everyone else wants it the other way around. What's the big deal?